Luke Cage Crowns Trayvon Martin And Breaks Netflix

Hoodies Are For Heroes Not Hoodlums

Andre has over 10 years of experience in Tech and Start-ups ranging from the advanced tech in the US Air Force to building his own educational software company Live 2 Learn Differently. His is a proud graduate of Morris Brown College and Cornell University.

This weekend marked one of the most astonishing weekends for entertainment in quite some time thanks to Netflix and Marvel. This inaugural season of the new series Luke Cage is based on the original comic books created by Marvel in the 1970’s.

Rather than placing the series in the “Blaxploitation” era, Marvel updated the series to reflect the current issues of the day. The show has powerful and complex characters such as Misty Knight, “Diamond Back,” Cotton Mouth and of course Luke Cage himself.

Often entertainment shies away from difficult topics, such as sexism, sexuality, rape, abuse, and race, but this series stands up to those issues and doesn’t ignore them. Everything from fake activists, crooked preachers, politicians, black on black crime and black conservatism are put to task in the first season of Luke Cage.

The cast itself does an outstanding job, capturing the intricacies of the characters that they are portraying. The legendary Alfre Woodard does her usual amazing work as “Black Mariah,” a crooked and conflicted politician related to the villain “Cotton Mouth” whose character is captured perfectly by Mahershala Ali. Micheal Colter and Simone Missick embody their characters in an irreplaceable and unmatched way.

The timeliness of a bulletproof black man in an era, where black men seem to be shooting targets for police and criminals is something to marvel at in itself.

The show was so highly watched and amazing that it broke Netflix for hours Saturday. The show had some bold parallels that many did not catch until the end. Luke Cage himself, wears a hoodie throughout most of the series, that hoodie consistently ends up with holes in it from bullets fired by his many enemies. This of course is a not so subtle nod to Trayvon Martin, and many other young black men killed at the hands of a fearful society.

The most vicious and dangerous criminals, Cotton Mouth and Diamond Back, wore nice suits throughout the entire series, while the hero Luke Cage found himself, in jeans and hoodies. At one point in the series, Luke Cage sees himself go from hero to villain in the eyes of the city and worldly and mainstream politicians; and police begin to hate him, while the streets, people within the community of Harlem view him as a true and honest hero.

Nowhere is it captured better than a scene in which the legendary Method Man of the Wu-Tang Clan does an impromptu freestyle dedicated to Luke Cage on the Sway In The Morning Show? Check out the clip below: